I’ve been thinking about getting a capture card soon because I’m gonna be getting a summer job I’ve been looking at the Elgato HD60 PRO but I don’t know if I should get that or something cheaper that gives the same value but idk, maybe an external one but I don’t see any use for it, I mostly want a capture card so I can record decent gameplay before I upgrade my system.

If you’re going to have a second rig, I personally would just opt to having a dedicated encoding GPU via OBS. Way easier to manage, less crazy of a setup doing a dual-PC rig. Plus you don’t need any crazy graphics card to encode for Twitch/locally.

I don’t have a nvidia card right know so I don’t think I can use shadowplay also I don’t like raptor or plays.tv because it doesn’t give me the option to seperate from the mic and desktop aidio as far as I’ve seen, but I’ve been messing with the bitrate in obs but in games like mkx were it does have 60 fps or above and drops to 30 when it won’t be noticed, so it makes it hard to find the right bitrate, I wish there was a tool to review your hardware and decide the best bitrate.

What is the rest of your rig’s specs? Are you trying to stream and record, or just record? You may be better off upgrading your GPU and just using Shadowplay or ReLive as recording software. I personally use OBS Studio though. My rig is a 5930K, 32GB RAM and a GTX780. I haven’t noticed any performance drops in games with these settings when I record.

Go to Settings > Output. Change ‘Output Mode’ to ‘Simple.’ Under ‘Recording,’ you can choose your recorded file location, ideally it would be on an SSD. I have my recording quality set to ‘High Quality, Medium File Size’, mp4 format, NVENC (GPU) encoder. Then select ‘Video’ from the left menu and set your Base/Canvas (generally your screen resolution) and your Output/Scaled Resolution (what resolution is being streamed/recorded). For recording, I set both to 1920x1080, streaming I change my Output resolution to 1280x720. The bottom option is your framerate, you may need to change the ‘Common FPS value’ to ‘Integer FPS Value’ to set it to 60fps, but that’s up to you. If your computer is hanging or stuttering, try dropping to a lower resolution or framerate.

Just to give you an idea of the quality, this is a scrim I subbed in the other night. I didn’t upload the raw clip, I rendered to Adobe’s default YouTube 1080p preset before uploading. And then there’s YouTube’s compression, so the source files do look better.

I only record at that quality when I’m not streaming, when I stream I just record at the stream quality. Check Twitch’s How-To for easy reference for bitrates and such. Some of the settings are in different locations, as that was written using the older OBS software, but it’s not hard to figure it out.

The Geforce experience capture software is so great, I started using Fraps for a few years, then I gave Dxtory a try, but the problem with those ones is the size of file it produces, like 40gb per 10 minuites of footage!

I’ve been wondering if there is a way to stress test obs, I’ve whatch some tutorials and my bitrate is close but I want to find something that will either give me the exact number or stress my hardware as I capture so I can minimise the amount of time I spend experimenting with, oh and here is a good obs tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArgLZWcVu24&t=967s, don’t bother with youtubes recommendation of 15000 bitrate for 1080 at 60 fps 55000 is where it’s at.

Also, keep in mind of your internet speeds. Where I live, the best we can get is 50Mbps down, 5Mbps up. I typically have my bitrate set at 3000-3500 for streaming to Twitch (720p/30fps for DJ’ing, 720p/60fps for gaming) as that’s all shitty Charter can handle.

And the best stress test is just playing games and recording. My overclocks were actually a bit unstable while gaming and streaming/recording; even though I’ve had zero issues with my OC before, once I started with the streaming stuff I would get random blue screens. I dialed things down a tad and it’s been perfect since.

I’ve been messing around with the rate controller in obs and that lead me to try CRF which I like because it the quality is amazing, but I’m wondering what the best CRF is. oh yeah and it made like a 1gb video file for a 9 minute video so that’s a bit of a con but I hate having poor quality gameplay.